If you’re a web programmer … and if you’re not, why are you reading this? … at some point you’ve wished you could integrate email into your webapp. Now, by integrate, I don’t mean sending emails … that’s trivial. Any language you can think of, there’s a library that will let you fire off all the html gibberish that fills your little hearts with joy.

The challenge comes when the little light goes off in your head and you think, “How hard could it be to have my app react to incoming email?” Maybe you’d like people to make forum posts by email, or create mailing lists ( listserv ) dynamically.

The answer used to be hard … very hard. A nightmarish mishmash of postfix, dovecot, procmail, pipes, and the odd custom script would get you something that might, maybe, let you fire off a script when a new email came in. Actually passing email data to your app? Forget it. And after all that, most people would rightly wash their hands of it and say ‘let’s just poll the mail server periodically’ … ick.

Why can’t I just convert emails to HTTP POST’s sent to an endpoint on my webapp? Oh … wait, I can, thanks to Zed Shaw’s LamsonProject.

But first, before going to the trouble of setting LamsonProject up, please be aware that there exist several semi-respectable SAAS companies trying to do this for you:

SendGrid Parse API : Email to POST. I’ve never heard anything bad about SendGrid ( a fair amount of good stuff ) but the it is a sideline to their main business of outsourcing your SMTP server for you.

… or an undergrad:

In a previous post, I mentioned Innocentive (wikipedia), a company that posts industrial science challenges with cash rewards for a solution. As full disclosure, I have previously had a solution bought by Innocentive, so I am a fan boy. To put it another way, it allows anyone with the skills, degree or no, to sell good ideas for thousands of dollars and maybe do some good in the process. Not a lot of good probably, but in the industrial chemistry world that’s maybe a better outcome than average.

Innocentive, for those of you who don’t know, is a company/community where science types can go to get cash awards for solving problems in science. Innocentive likes to call this the ‘open sourcing of science’ which makes for good PR, but a closer description might be ‘outsourcing the R&D dept.’ As full disclosure, I’ve been a member of the community for several years and have received $10K for my chemistry solutions posted there … I think on balance it’s a great idea executed well.

But the trouble is, they believe their own PR and the write-ups they’ve received in the press (see list below). Several weeks ago Innocentive created a project to collect ‘emergency response’ ideas to deal with the oil spill. Not surprisingly, Innocentive received around a thousand and counting proposed solutions. What they did next is surprising … they dropped all thousand ideas into the lap of BP. Because more is always better, right? A quick scenario to consider:

Your car engine is on fire and the only copy of your thesis is stuck inside.

A. Your best friend comes up, details how to put the fire out and offers to help.

B. An acquaintance comes up, lists 80 possible ways to put the fire out ( some involving things you don’t have on hand, some of which might not work ) and then asks why you aren’t using one of their ideas.

Innocentive is a great font of ideas, but it takes time to sort the wheat from the chaff, to convince companies that the new solutions might work, and to test. Innocentive’s challenges usually last several weeks, starting from well defined and tractable problems. After that is a testing phase that last months. If they were working on a solution for the next oil spill, I’d applaud it as forward thinking.

If they have a working idea, put it out there … say to the media, “We’ve an idea we’ve tested and think is a great solution … but we don’t want to overburden the people out in the field who are trying their best.” Complaining to the government that the engineers at BP aren’t taking you seriously, and then to the media (see email to Innocentive members) in the middle of a crisis when you know you can’t push a solution out the door fast enough just feels like chasing ambulances for the sake of PR.

I know everyone’s feelings are running hot about the spill, so please feel free to tell me where I’m wrong in the comments. If people are interested, I’m also thinking about writing a more positive entry on Innocentive showing how it works well for undergrads.

In the second of what appears to be a series of commentary on the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math hearings being held by the US House subcommittee for Science, I’d like to draw your attention to a few points in “Reform in K-12 STEM Education”.

First the funny bits, brought to you today by Dr. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University:

“Mathematics is very intimidating. Every time I go and visit with our Math department … I take Valium before I go over … they scare the hell out of me.” (1:18:43) … So remember kids, if your PI asks why you’re dropping X before group meeting, tell ‘em Dr. Gee said it was cool. Honestly, I think most group meetings would be improved by a little X.

“If you can’t be a lawyer, if you can’t be a doctor … you can always be a teacher.” (1:10:06) I kid, I kid.